Isle Of The Dead

by Roger Zelazny

  "Green Green," I said, "you are the clumsiest Pei'an I've ever met."

  "I have made a few mistakes," he acknowledged, from back in the shadows.

  I chuckled.

  "I'd say so."

  "There were extenuating circumstances involved."

  "Excuses. You did not properly learn the lesson of the rock. It appears to rest, but it does move, imperceptibly." I shook my head. "How will your ancestors rest after a bungled piece of vengeance like this?"

  "Poorly, I fear, if this be the end."

  "Why shouldn't it be? Do you deny that you assured my presence here solely for purposes of obtaining my death?"

  "Why should I deny the obvious?"

  "Why should I fail to do the logical thing?"

  "Think, Francis Sandow, _Dra_ Sandow. How logical would it be? Why should I approach you in this fashion, when I might have allowed you to come to me where I held a position of power?"

  "Perhaps I rattled your nerves last evening."

  "Do not judge me that unstable. I came to place you under my control."

  "And failed."

  "... And failed."

  "Why did you come?"

  "I require your services."

  "To what end?"

  "We must leave here quickly. You possess a means of departure?"

  "Naturally. What are you afraid of?"

  "Over the years, you have collected some friends and many enemies, Francis Sandow."

  "Call me Frank. I feel as if I've known you a long time, dead man."

  "You should not have sent that message, Frank. Now your presence here is known. Unless you help me to escape, you will face a vengeance greater than mine."

  A shifting of the breeze brought me the sweet, musty smell of that which passes for blood in a Pei'an. I flicked on my hand torch and aimed it at him.

  "You're hurt."

  "Yes."

  I dropped the torch, sidled over to my knapsack, opened it with my left hand. I fished out the first aid pouch and tossed it to him.

  "Cover your cuts," I said, picking up the light once more. "They smell bad."

  He unrolled a bandage and wrapped it about his gashed right shoulder and forearm. He ignored a series of smaller wounds on his chest.

  "You look as if you've been in a fight."

  "I have."

  "What shape is the other guy in?"

  "I hurt him. I was lucky. I almost killed him, in fact. Now it is too late."

  I saw that he wasn't carrying a weapon, so I holstered my own. I advanced and stood before him.

  "Delgren of Dilpei sends his greetings," I said. "I think you've managed to make his fecal roster."

  He snorted, chuckled.

  "He was to be next," he said, "after yourself."

  "You still haven't given me a good reason for keeping you alive."

  "But I've aroused your curiosity, which is keeping me alive. Getting me bandaged, even."

  "My patience departs, like sand through a sieve."

  "Then you have not learned the lesson of the rock."

  I lit a cigarette. "I'm in a position to choose my proverbs as I go along. You are not," I said.

  He finished bandaging himself, then, "I wish to propose a bargain."

  "Name it."

  "You have a vessel hidden somewhere. Take me .to it. Take me with you, away from this world."

  "In return for what?"

  "Your life."

  "You're hardly in a position to threaten me."

  "I am not making a threat. I am offering to save your life for the moment, if you will do the same for me."

  "Save me from what?"

  "You know that I can restore certain persons to life."

  "Yeah, you stole some Recall Tapes. --How did you do it, by the way?"

  "Teleportation. It is my talent. I can transfer small objects from one place to another. Many years ago, when I first began studying you and plotting my vengeance, I made visits to Earth--each time one of your friends or enemies died there, in fact. I waited then until I had accumulated sufficient funds to purchase this world, which I thought to be a fitting place for what I had in mind. It is not difficult for a worldscaper to learn to employ the tapes."

  "My friends, my enemies--you restored them here?"

  "That is correct."

  "Why?"

  "For you to see your loved ones suffer once again, before you died yourself; and for your enemies. to watch you in your pain."

  "Why did you do what you did to the one called Dango?"

  "The man annoyed me. By setting him up as an example and warning for you, I also removed him from my presence and provided him with a maximum of pain. In this fashion, he served three useful purposes."

  "What was the third?"

  "My amusement, of course."

  "I see. But why here? Why Illyria?"

  "Second to Homefree, which is inaccessible, is this world not your favorite creation?"

  "Yes."

  "What better place then?"

  I dropped my cigarette, ground it out with my heel.

  "You are stronger than I thought, Frank," he said after a moment, "because you killed him once, and he has beaten me, taken away from me a thing without price ...

  Suddenly I was back on Homefree, in my roof garden, puffing a cigar, seated next to a shaved monkey named Lewis Briggs. I had just opened an envelope, and I was running my eyes down a list of names.

  So it wasn't telepathy. It was just memory and apprehension.

  "Mike Shandon," I said softly.

  "Yes. I did not know him for what he was, or I would not have recalled him."

  It should have hit me sooner. The fact that he had recalled all of them, I mean. It should have, but it didn't. I'd been too busy thinking about Kathy and blood.

  "You stupid son of a bitch," I said. "You stupid son of a bitch... ."

  * * *

  Back in the century into which I had been born, like number twenty, the art or craft--as the case may be--of espionage enjoyed a better public image than either the U.S. Marine Corps or the AMA. It was, I suppose, partly a romantic escape mechanism with respect to international tensions. It got out of hand, though, as anything must if it is to leave a mark upon its times. In the long history of popular heroes, from Renaissance princes through poor boys who live clean, work hard and marry the bosses' daughters, the man with the cyanide capsule for a tooth, the lovely traitoress for a mistress and the impossible mission where sex and violence are shorthand for love and death, this man came into his own in the seventh decade of the twentieth century and is indeed remembered with a certain measure of nostalgia-- like Christmas in Medieval England. He was, of course, abstracted from the real thing. And spies are an even duller lot today than they were then. They collect every bit of trivia they can lay their hands on and get it back to someone who feeds it to a data-processing machine, along with thousands of other items, a minor fact is thereby obtained, someone writes an obscure memo concerning it and the memo is filed and forgotten. As I mentioned earlier, there is very little precedent for interstellar warfare, and classical spying deals, basically, with military matters. When this extension of politics becomes well-nigh impossible because of logistics problems, the importance of such matters diminishes. The only real talented, important spies today are the industrial spies. The man who delivered into the hands of General Motors the microfilmed blueprints of Ford's latest brainchild or the gal with Dior's new line sketched inside her bra, _these_ spies received very little notice in the twentieth century. Now, however, they are the only genuine items around. The tensions involved in interstellar commerce are enormous. Anything that will give you an edge--a new manufacturing process, a classified shipping schedule--may become as important as the Manhattan Project once was. If somebody has something like this and you want it, a real spy is worth his weight in meerschaum.

  Mike Shandon was a real spy, the best one I'd ever employed. I can never think of him without a certain twitch of envy. He was everythin
g I once wished I could be.

  He was around two inches taller than me and perhaps twenty-five pounds heavier. His eyes were the color of just-polished mahogany and his hair was black as ink. He was damnably graceful, had a sickeningly beautiful voice and was always dressed to perfection. A farm boy from the breadbasket world Wava, he'd had an itchy heel and expensive tastes. He'd educated himself while being rehabilitated after some antisocial acts. In my youth, you would have said he'd spent his free hours in the prison library while doing time for grand larceny. You don't say it that way any more, but it amounts to the same thing. His rehabilitation was successful, if you judge it by the fact that it was a long time before he got caught again. Of course, he had a lot going for him. So much, in fact, that I was surprised he'd ever been tripped up--though he often said he was born to come in second. He was a telepath, and he had a damn near photographic memory. He was strong and tough and smart and he could hold his liquor and women fell all over him. So I think my certain twitch is not without foundalion.

  He'd worked for me for several years before I'd actually met him. One of my recruiters had turned him up and sent him through Sandow Enterprises' Special Executive Training Group (Spy School). A year later he emerged second in his class. Subsequent to that, he distinguished himself when it came to product research, as we call it. His name kept cropping up in classified reports, so one day I decided to have dinner with him,

  Sincerity and good manners, that's all I remembered afterwards. He was a born con man.

  There are not too many human telepaths around, and telepathically obtained information is not admissable in court. Nevertheless, the ability is obviously valuable.

  Valuable as he might have been, however, Shandon was something of a problem. Whatever his earnings, he spent more.

  It was not until years after his death that I learned of his blackmail activities. The thing that tripped him up, actually, was his moonlighting.

  We knew there was a major security leak at SE. We didn't know how or where, and it took close to five years to find out. By then, Sandow Enterprises was beginning to totter.

  We nailed him. It wasn't easy, and it involved four other telepaths. But we cornered him and brought him to trial. I testified at great length, and he was convicted, sentenced and shipped off for more rehabilitation. I undertook three worldscaping jobs then, to keep SE functioning smoothly. We weathered the vicissitudes that followed, but not without a lot of trouble.

  ... One item of which was Shandon's escape from rehabilitative custody. This was several years later, but word of it spread fast. His trial had been somewhat sensational.

  So his name was added to the wanted lists. But the universe is a big place ...

  It was near Coos Bay, Oregon, that I'd taken a seaside place for my stay on Earth. Two to three months had seemed in order, as I was there to watch over our merger with a couple North American companies.

  Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands--alternately cool, warm, moist and dry--a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spitflecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience. I walked beside it every morning before breakfast, and again in the evening before retiring. My name was Carlos Palermo, if anybody cared. After six weeks, the place had gotten me to feeling clean and healthy; and what with the mergers, my financial empire was finally coming back into balance.

  The place where I stayed was set in a small cove. The house, a white, stucco building with red-tiled roof and an enclosed courtyard behind it, was right by the water. Set in the seaside wall was a black, metal gate, and beyond this lay the beach. To the south, a high escarpment of gray shale; a tangled mass of bushes and trees ended the beach to the north. It was peaceful, I was peaceful.

  The night was cool--you could almost say chill. A big, three-quarter moon was working its way down into the west and dripping light onto the water. The stars seemed exceptionally bright. Far out over the heaving bulk of the ocean, a cluster of eight sea-mine derricks blocked starlight. A floating island occasionally reflected moonbeams from off its slick surfaces.

  I didn't hear him coming. Apparently he had worked his way down through the brush to the north, waited till I was as near as I was going to be, approached as close as he could and rushed me when I became aware of his presence.

  It is easier than you might think for one telepath to conceal himself from another, while remaining aware of the other's position and general activities. It is a matter of "blocking"--imagining a shield around yourself and remaining as emotionally inert as possible.

  Admitted, this is rather difficult to do when you hate a man's guts and are stalking him for purposes of killing him. This, probably, is what saved my life.

  I cannot really say that I realized there was a vicious presence at my back. It was just that as I took the night air and strolled along the line of the surf, I suddenly became apprehensive. Those nameless thoughts that sometimes run through the back of your head when you awaken for no apparent reason in the middle of a still, warm summer night, lie there awhile wondering what the hell woke you up, and then hear an unusual sound in the next room, magnified by the quiet, electrified by your inexplicable resurrection into a sense of emergency and stomach-squeezing tension--those thoughts raced in an instant, and my toes and fingertips (old anthropoid reflex!) tingled, and the night seemed a shade darker and the sea a home for possible terrors whose sucking tentacles mingled with the wave even then heading toward me; overhead, a line of brightness signified an upper-atmosphere transport which could any moment cease to function and descend like a meteor upon me.

  So, when I heard the first, quick crunch of sand behind me, the adrenalin was already there.

  I turned quickly, dropping into a crouch. My right foot skidded out behind me as I moved, and I fell to one knee.

  A blow to the side of my face sent me sprawling to my right. He was upon me then, and we grappled in the sand, rolling, wrestling for position. Crying out would have been a waste of breath, for there was nobody else around. I tried to scuff sand into his eyes, I tried to knee him in the groin and jab him in any of a dozen painful places. He had been well trained, however, and he outweighed me and seemed faster, too.

  Strange as it sounds, we fought for close to five minutes before I realized who he was. We were in the wet sand then, with the surf breaking about us, and he had already broken my nose with a forward smash of his head and snapped two of my fingers when I'd tried for a lock about his throat. The moonlight touched his moist face and I saw that it was Shandon and knew that I would have to kill him to stop him. A knockout would not be good enough. A prison or a hospital would only postpone another encounter. He had to die if I was to live. I imagine his reasoning was the same.

  Moments later, something hard and sharp jabbed me in the back, and I wriggled to the left. If a man decides he wants to kill me, I don't much care how I do it to him. Being first is the only thing that matters.

  As the surf splashed about my ears and Shandon pushed my head backwards into the water, I groped with my right hand and found the rock.

  The first blow glanced off the forearm he had raised in defense. Telepaths have a certain advantage in a fight, because they often know what the other fellow is planning to do next. But it is a terrible thing to know and not be able to do a thing about it. My second blow smashed into his left eyesocket, and he must have seen his death coming because he howled then, like a dog, right before I pulped his temple. I hit him twice again for good measure, pushed him off and rolled away, the rock slipping from my fingers and splashing beside me.

  I lay there for a long while, blinking back at the stars, while the surf washed me and the body of my enemy rocked gently, a few feet away.

  When I recovered, I searched him, and among other things I found a pistol. It carried a full charge and was in perfect operating condition.

  In other words, he'd wanted t
o kill me with his hands. He had estimated he was able to, and he had preferred risking injury in order to do it that way. He could have nailed me from the shadows, but he had had guts enough to follow the dictates of his hate. He could have been the most dangerous man I had ever faced, if he had used his brains. For this, I respected him. If it had been the other way around, _I_ would have done it the easy way. If the reasons for any violence in which I may indulge are emotional ones, I never let those feelings dictate the means.

  I reported the attack, and Shandon lay dead on Earth. Somewhere in Dallas, he had become a strip of tape you could hold in the palm of your hand--all that he ever was or hoped to be--weighing less than an ounce. After thirty days, that too, would be gone.

  Weeks later, on the eve of my departure, I stood on the same spot, there on the other side of the Big Pond from Tokyo Bay, and I knew that once you go down in it you do not come again. The reflected stars buckled and twisted, like in warp-drive, and though I did not know it at the time, somewhere a green man was laughing. He had gone fishing in the Bay.

  * * *

  "You stupid son of a bitch," I said.

  VI

  To have it all to do over again annoyed me. But more than annoyance, there was a certain fear. Shandon had slipped up, selling himself to his emotions once. He would not be likely to make the same mistake again. He was a tough, dangerous man, and now he apparently had a piece of something which made him even more dangerous. Also, he had to be aware of my presence on Illyria, after my sending to Green Green earlier in the evening.

  "You have complicated my problem," I said, "so you are going to help me resolve it."

  "I do not understand," Green Green said.

  "You baited a trap for me and it has grown more teeth," I told him, "but the bait is just as much an inducement now as it was before. I'm going after it, and you're coming along."

  He laughed.

  "I am sorry, but my path leads in the opposite direction. I will not go back willingly, and I would be of no use to you as a prisoner. In fact, I would represent a distinct impediment."